by M B Vincent
‘You what?’ Jess looked him up and down. Rupert was never banal. Not with her. ‘It was, you know, day-ish. Sit down, Rupert. You look as if you’re on your way out.’
Rupert sat abruptly. As if he was Moose. ‘Hope you like risotto.’
‘Depends what’s in it.’ Jess took a sip of her water. She rebooted her manners. ‘I love risotto.’ Middlebrow jazz, the kind Jess abhorred in bars, sputtered in the background of their silence. ‘Takes a lot of stirring.’
‘It’s all about the rice,’ said Rupert.
‘Yeah,’ said Jess, slowly. She laughed. ‘Jesus, Rupert, what’s wrong with us? We’re playing at grown-ups.’
‘I know, right?’ Rupert looked relieved. ‘It’s not like we’ve just met.’
‘Perhaps we only work in public.’
‘I hope not.’
The dim lighting, the jazz, the newly discovered and rather nice chest hair turned each of Rupert’s utterances to code. Jess hadn’t had much luck with symbols lately.
Things loosened up a little. Jess was enlisted to chop tomatoes. The tiny shiny kitchen was a medley of highend finishes. ‘You live in a Nespresso advert, Rumpole.’
‘I hardly ever get to cook at home.’ He turned from his stirring. ‘So this is nice. You here, I mean. Cooking for you.’
‘I’ll cook for you one evening.’ The tomato was as plump and bloody as a heart. Jess hesitated, the knife in mid-air. She saw gore where she should have seen salad. The murders had seeped into her imagination. ‘I haven’t cooked in ages,’ she said quietly.
As they took their platefuls to the table, the flat didn’t seem so polished to Jess. It was calm. Safe. The candles on the table, although possibly part of that code she mistrusted, would be kind to the hollows beneath her eyes.
‘Tell me stuff,’ said Rupert. He had a fleck of chive on his chin.
‘Like what?’
‘Stuff like . . .’ Rupert did not convince with his pretence at deep thought. ‘Your last relationship.’
‘It was fun. Then it wasn’t. Bit of a mess.’
‘I tend to have long relationships. Not much good at flings. I like, you know, continuity.’
‘I don’t,’ said Jess. ‘I’m restless.’ She remembered, a little too late, that there’s no need to tell the whole truth in every situation. She felt like she was at a job interview and had just answered the question ‘What’s your worst fault?’ with ‘I’m a thief’ instead of ‘I’m a perfectionist’.
‘Whereas I sit at the same table in The Spinning Jenny every time I go in.’
‘I’m sort of crazy,’ said Jess. ‘I sometimes sit in the window. Sometimes I hang about the counter. Wild shit like that.’
‘You don’t like talking about yourself.’
‘I’m just not that interesting.’
‘I disagree.’
Both of them ate in silence for a while, thrilled and scared by the line in the sand Rupert had just hopped over.
Rupert said, ‘Do you like apple pie?’
Jess, who loathed apple pie, said, ‘Adore it.’
She loathed it so much she asked for seconds, out of guilt. ‘Did you make it?’
‘I’m a metrosexual, Jess, not an actual woman. It’s from Waitrose.’
‘Now you mention it, I can taste the middle-class-ness.’
‘Coffee?’
‘Nah. I’ll be up all night widdling.’ Jess was impressed by her own ability to destroy atmosphere; even candlelight couldn’t prettify that mental image.
Rupert was unfazed. He rooted out some mint teabags.
They sat side by side, primly apart, on the uncompromising sofa.
He generated heat. She felt his nearness. Jess wondered if she had the same effect on him.
‘I’m bad at this, Rumpole.’
‘At what?’
‘Low lights. Lingering looks.’ Something had become clear to Jess. She needed this man. His friendship was important to her.
‘I’m not what you’d call a professional.’ Rupert smiled.
‘Hang on, weren’t you engaged at one point?’ Jess put her hand to her mouth. ‘I remember Stephen telling me. Years ago.’
‘Don’t remind me.’ Rupert closed his eyes. ‘I bought her a ring and everything. We were so young. We were practically toddlers. Well, we were twenty.’
‘She had a posh name . . .’
‘Saffron.’
‘What happened? Why aren’t you married?’ That thought, of Rupert ringfenced by A. N. Other, caused a sharp pain in Jess’s ribs.
‘She was a lovely person. It just wasn’t right.’ Rupert pouted. ‘You jealous?’
She hesitated. ‘A bit.’
‘Good.’
On the coffee table, Jess’s phone vibrated. She leant forward. ‘Eden,’ she said. ‘I’d better take it.’
‘Can’t you have a night off?’ Rupert was peeved. He retired to the kitchen and opened and closed cupboards.
Eden’s voice was tinny. He was out there somewhere in the big dark blank beyond the Old Mill’s picture window. Jess regretted allowing him in, but he had news and she was soon caught up in it.
‘Unthank,’ he said. ‘Not our guy. The manageress lied because Unthank was in her bed on the nights of the murders. They met at the Baldur gig, and their affair has been going on ever since.’
‘What about the wife in Dalston?’
‘I can’t arrest him for adultery. Unfortunately.’
‘So he’s in the clear?’
‘Completely. There are timestamped selfies and movies.’
Jess assimilated the news. ‘I really thought . . . The Hellcat angle, the strophalos.’
‘They aren’t hard clues, Jess. Hecate won’t solve this case.’
‘You can say I told you so if you like.’
‘I’ll just say goodnight.’
She debriefed Rupert, who interrupted her halfway through. ‘Let’s not talk about the case, eh?’
‘Sorry. I’m a one-note samba.’
‘It’s all murder murder murder with you.’ Rupert made her laugh and that made him laugh. ‘I still worry, Jess. Violent crime investigations can be dangerous if you go in too deep.’
He could have been talking about relationships. There was magnetism in the air and they were two helpless iron filings. She could kiss Rupert now. He wouldn’t pull away. He would press her against him.
The quickest way to burn a friendship is to turn it into romance.
‘Murder’s off the menu,’ said Rupert. ‘Let’s enjoy the bright lights of Castle Kidbury laid out at our feet.’
‘It’s hardly LA.’
‘No. It’s better.’
They both stared out at the sleeping town. The traffic lights winking on Fore Street. A stammering streetlamp on the Keep.
‘Have you ever had a girlfriend who didn’t have a mythical name?’ Jess edged a little closer. ‘I mean, there’s Pandora and her famous box. Saffron is mentioned a lot in old works. Hecate is sometimes referred to as the saffron-cloaked empress of the sea, the sky and the underworld.’
‘You can talk.’ Rupert deliberated. He went for it. ‘Jessica Guinevere Castle.’
‘No!’ Jess was outraged. It was a family taboo to say her middle name out loud, and he knew it. She roared with scandalised laughter and flew at him.
Rupert grabbed her wrist as she hit at his chest.
He held it. They struggled playfully. They stopped laughing.
Rupert’s landline rang.
He tutted.
She groaned. She moved as if to untangle herself.
‘Let’s leave it,’ he said. He said it like a dare.
Jess always took dares.
They stared at each other as the phone clicked off.
Please don’t leave a message, whoever you are, thought Jess.
A disembodied voice filled the room.
Squeezers was saying, high-pitched, nervous, ‘Hello Mr Rupert. I’m having a bit of bother.’
‘You’re Sq
ueezers’ lawyer?’ Jess gaped.
‘Hardly. I help the poor bugger out now and then.’ Rupert gritted his teeth. ‘Go. Away. Squeezers.’
Squeezers rambled on. ‘I’m a bit worried, Mr Rupert. I’ve been slightly silly.’
Jess removed her hand. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Squeezers has nobody.’
‘Promise you’ll be here when I get back?’ Rupert walked away backwards, picking up his coat and his keys.
Jess had never known a man so comfortable with eye contact. ‘I promise.’
Alone, tingling, she threw herself back on the sofa with a groan of lust. She congratulated herself on wearing one of her more presentable bras.
The window drew her with an unearthly force. She wanted to be rooted tonight; she wanted to wait for Rupert and ignore Deiphon. This was her night off.
Deliberately, she turned away from the glass.
A framed artwork was on the floor, facing the wall. Jess saw the nail it had hung on.
She turned the frame around. It was a black and white shot of Pandora. Jess recognised it, an advert from early in the model’s career. She was naked – naturally – in black and white, holding a camera against what Jess was pleased to note were very small breasts.
Had Rupert taken the print down because Jess was coming round? Was that good? Or bad?
This, she thought, is why I don’t have relationships. The second-guessing. The jumping to conclusions. Her sheer wrongness about Unthank had unnerved her.
The camera was an Olympus.
Another little nudge from the ancients. A brand name borrowed from the home of the gods. Jess had been to the modern-day Mount Olympus; no gods there now, just souvenir shops.
The unscientific side of Jess’s brain, the part she didn’t encourage, kept trying to catch her attention. Jess knew mythology was a code. An enduring one. It was no surprise to see its echoes everywhere; her last lecture had been on that very topic.
‘Crossing Over’, she’d called it. The overlap of the modern and the antiquated. Like Hecate, she’d said to her students. Crossing between worlds, myths refuse to die, they simply retell themselves.
Like her dream.
It refused to know its place. It threw shards of memory in her path for her to cut herself. Jess felt its insistence. If she, just this once, stood still and listened, then maybe the dream would find a voice.
An image firmed up. Landed – plop! – in her consciousness. She’d been reaching and reaching and now suddenly it was easy.
A plaque.
Wooden. Made with care and craftsmanship.
A three-headed goddess, surrounded by carved waves, with a carved moon above her.
And inlaid along the bottom, a series of dots and dashes that seven-year-old Jess hadn’t known how to read. Adult Jess read the ogham with ease.
‘Hecate’, it said.
And muggins here paid for it.
Chapter 30
MANNERS COST NOTHING
Still Thursday 2 June
Jess had the roads to herself.
She was high as a kite on her new certainty. She had begun to dial Eden’s number, only to drop the phone back into her bag. This was a hunch; he didn’t like hunches. How to explain to a creature of reason that she had decided to trust a dream?
She drove fast. Like an arrow shot from a bow. Jess had sufficient self-awareness to know that part of her reluctance to involve Eden was so she could have the glory of breaking the infamous Rustic Ripper case.
The road was narrow, little more than a lane, when she left the beaten path. The route was new, the turning remembered from childhood outings when her parents would point it out. Don’t go down there, they’d say. Only one house down there and you wouldn’t want to visit it.
I can always whistle up support later, she thought.
She got out. Closed the Morris Traveller’s door quietly.
Jess was only a mile from Castle Kidbury, but the soft dip of the valley meant she saw only unscrolling black fields. The lonely house was abruptly white, like a tooth. One window was lit. Out in the front yard, it was silent and dark and she shivered.
Her phone ruptured the silence.
Mary’s voice was tinny. Barely there, and breaking up. ‘How’s . . . going . . . you and Rupert?’
‘I left. Long story.’
Mary’s surprise was evident even though the reception was poor. Knowing she was safe in her hospital bed subverted the eerie landscape for Jess. A little.
‘I thought . . . tonight . . . Rupert . . .’
Jess tried to fill in the hissing blanks. She remembered the scribbled note she’d left on his fridge. ‘Sorry.’ So abrupt. Another regret to add to her collection.
As Mary prattled, Jess edged forward. She saw a shed.
Cue horror-movie music, she thought as she pushed the door and it creaked in pain.
A tool shed. Woodworking equipment. All of it kept beautifully clean and in mint condition, in contrast to the near-derelict surroundings.
‘Shit,’ said Jess. She felt her aloneness.
‘Shit what? What shit?’ squawked Mary.
A voice behind Jess asked, not unreasonably, ‘What are you doing in my shed?’
Jess jumped. ‘You frightened me!’ Buying time, she put her phone to her ear, but the connection was severed. ‘Listen, Mary, I’ll call you back. I just ran into an old friend.’
Neil Semple looked as if he might dispute that title.
‘What am I doing here?’ Jess hadn’t rehearsed a reason. ‘I was passing and I saw your light and I thought, hey, why not catch up?’
‘Catch up?’ Neil’s lips were a lifeless blue. ‘Why?’ He was puzzled. Inhospitable. The mistrustful runt of the litter. ‘Nobody visits.’
‘Until now!’ Jess was toothy. ‘Can I come in? I could murder a cup of tea.’
Later, she thought, I’ll tell Mary I said that.
Indoors was only marginally more domestic than the yard.
In a cave-dark room, furniture loomed, tall and ugly. A dresser. A table. Hard chairs standing at angles to each other. All like doll’s house pieces plonked down anyhow by a giant hand.
‘Do you want to sit down?’ Neil’s offer was half-hearted. ‘Nana used to ask people if they wanted to sit down.’ He looked as if he didn’t understand all this sitting-down business. Physically, he was obviously about Jess’s age, but he had the mannerisms of a child. Shy. Mulish. Wanting to be elsewhere. ‘You could sit there.’ He pointed to a leather armchair, brown and stained.
‘I’d love to.’ Jess kept it light. ‘Shall we put a lamp on? I can’t even see your face!’
‘No leccy.’ Neil took a step and disappeared completely in the blackout. ‘I got this, though.’ A burst of cold light made Jess cower. Neil had powered up a battery-driven lamp, the kind campers use. It cast a frosty pall over the room. Like snow.
‘I would have tidied a bit,’ said Neil. ‘If I’d known you were coming, like.’
The cottage was beyond tidying. It needed to be bulldozed and started over.
‘Tea,’ said Neil. ‘Tea,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t have none.’
‘Glass of water?’
‘Okay.’ Neil didn’t move.
A grinning face was picked out in the barren light.
Propped among cracked crockery on the dresser was a carved wooden disc. Jess took it down. She felt Neil tense, but she held it with reverence and he didn’t stop her.
She knew the face. Broad features. From the eyebrows, leaves sprouted. More greenery gushed from the open mouth.
‘Did you make this, Neil?’
‘Granddad did. We like to talk about the Green Man.’
‘Me too. There are so many theories and stories about him.’
‘He looks after the woods. He cares about trees and plants and little animals and that.’
‘The Christians adopted him. There’s usually a representation of the Green Man among the gargoyles on old churches. But he’s pagan through and through. He ha
s more in common with Cernunnos than Jesus.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘A shape-shifter.’ Jess drew him in. ‘Guardian of the forest. He had horns, though, so the church wasn’t keen on him. Horns mean, you know, him.’ Jess motioned to the floor.
‘Old Nick,’ said Neil. He was warming up slightly. A warmed-up cadaver.
‘Exactly. Christians are scaredy-cats. They say that the wood of the cross was grown from seeds placed under Adam’s tongue as he died.’
Neil didn’t respond beyond a faint shrug.
Which was odd, in a town suffering a plague of crucifixions. ‘Sorry, Neil. I go on a bit, don’t I?’
‘S’all right. You’re like the radio.’
‘This carving is amazing. Are those your granddad’s tools out in the shed?’
‘Yeah. I don’t use them. I could never be as good as him. He’s a genius.’
Jess had heard her father talk about Neil’s grandfather. He hadn’t called him a genius. He’d said the old man was cruel. Puritanical.
‘You and your granddad, you like to talk about the old ways.’
‘They’re not old,’ said Neil. He was taken aback. ‘They’re all around us.’
If she lived outside of society in this godforsaken house, Jess could believe that too. She felt the isolation. She realised her mistake in going it alone. She glanced at the phone in her hand.
Neil, seemingly so inattentive, saw the look. ‘The Green Man clogs the airwaves. That phone’s just a lump of metal here.’
‘It was sad about Gavin, wasn’t it?’
‘S’pose.’ Neil didn’t jump at the name. ‘Never liked him.’
No faux respect for the dead here.
‘Remember his seventh birthday party?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I still have nightmares about it.’
Neil looked vaguely surprised. ‘Why?’
‘Because, well . . .’ It hardly needed explaining. ‘We were in the water when Becky drowned.’
‘She wasn’t the only one hurt that day.’
‘Well, yes, somebody else cut their leg.’ Jess swallowed. Steadied herself. She was at the red-hot heart of the murders, reliving a brutal fragment of the past that they both shared. He was unmoved. By Becky’s little body in its sunshine-yellow swimsuit. By the people he’d crucified. ‘They lived to tell the tale, though.’